


If Disbelief Were Currency (We Would All Be Kings)

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Into This Abyss [1]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Angst, Brotherly Love, Daemon Separation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Maybe Some Destiel, No Wincest, Reunions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 19:34:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11493273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: It's been fifteen months since Dick Roman fizzled and burst into a million specks of black viscous nothingness. Sam would say he's doing well, all things considered.(Sam's daemon disagrees.)It's been three months since Dean dragged his sorry ass out of God's Armpit to find his brother coasting along like he's never even heard of Leviathans. It doesn't matter.(Dean's daemon disagrees.)





	1. PROLOGUE: Notes on the Universe

**This is purely notes about the story so if you aren't interesting in reading things that might be helpful (i.e. reminders of Pullman's universe or explanations of the Author's logic) please feel free to skip to Chapter One.**

**Fair warning, updates might be kind of slow. I'm not good at short chapters...**

  * This story devolves from Supernatural canon (even more than it already does by the crossing of these universes, of course) post-Season Seven/beginning Season Eight. Dean and Cas did get sent to Purgatory, Sam is left all alone in the world, and he does meet Amelia; Kevin is stolen away by Crowley. The world as a whole has a few discrepancies from supernatural canon, but nothing noticeably relevant here.


  * There are some glaring difficulties in crossing these two worlds together, the main one being the term “dæmon”. As a reader, it’s easy to distinguish between dæmon and demon, less so when speaking out loud. For the purposes of this universe, it is commonplace (if hunters can be described as such) to refer to demons as hell-demons, to avoid confusion.


  * Much of the “dæmon lore” of the Pullman world is debatable. Names of a child’s dæmon are given by their parents. I’ve taken Pullman’s lead in using names based in Greek and Latin (and names that imply aspects of character), but there are others, too, that you can find mentions of at the end of each chapter when relevant.


  * There won’t be any characters from Lyra’s world. At least, I don’t think so. If there’s any appearance, it will probably be cameo mentions.


  * The settled form of a dæmon is more explicitly indicative of a person’s nature. This is a fact of Pullman’s universe, but the nature of how the dæmon’s settling occurs is less easily defined. It is linked to maturity, love (arguably) and self-acceptance. It’s not specifically stated that a dæmon is an external manifestation of a human’s soul, but for the purposes of this world I am taking that to be the precise case.


  * The gender of dæmons is also not fully explained by Pullman. It is mentioned in Northern Lights that dæmons who are the same sex as their humans are rare. I always assumed that meant that these humans are gay, but Pullman indicated that was not entirely the case, which helpfully avoids all arguments from a more rounded LGBT+ perspective. (What about transgender people? What about pansexual people? This troubled me for a while the second time I read the trilogy.) I am to some extent going to take the licence that a dæmon’s gender does partly indicate the human’s gender identity and/or sexual orientation. However, it is not the be all and end all. This is more relevant in other stories I have lined up.


  * I get it a bit flexibly philosophical with the human-dæmon bond, too, by the way.


  * From what I could find, it seems that the average distance a human and their dæmon can comfortably have between them is approximately 9 feet. It can be pushed a bit further, but it becomes physically and emotionally painful to do so. **This is an important thing to know for the purpose of this story** and others that will probably follow it.




	2. CHAPTER ONE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for taking this journey with me. There's a severe lack of His Dark Materials crossovers out there and this story has been dancing around in my head for a while - I also have some very strong opinions on what Sam and Dean would be like with daemons that I wanted to put out into the world. I hope you enjoy it. (That might be the wrong word, it's probably going to get quite dark.)  
> I'll put some daemon explanations at the end of chapters for anyone who is interested. If you fancy leaving a little review or a kudos, that would be cool with me.

_That pride you didn’t like was Alexander’s salvation;_

_never fawning, never pushing, never envious, never false._

_~ (Ptolemy) Mary Renault, Funeral Games_

.

.

“ _…ago that forty-two year old Vincent Motts, the ninth resident of Topeka to fall victim to this bizarre and terrifying series of incidents, has been moved to the ICU, after his daemon went into a catatonic state last night, less than twenty-four hours after she attacked Motts in his front yard. This is the exact same pattern we have seen with the previous eight victims over the past few days: a daemon attacks their human, before attempting to mutilate and sever their bond, finally dropping into what appears to be some kind of catatonia a few hours later._

“ _Doctors are yet to offer any kind of statement on what is causing this string of outbursts, but it appears there is yet no comprehensible link between the victims._

“ _I’m here today with Dr Lois Gilbert, who specialises in psychological trauma within the human-daemon bond. Dr Gilbert, have you ever seen anything like this before_?”

Sam mutes the television with a hard click of the remote, glowering at the reporter, at his slick black hair and the ugly look of glee in his eyes at having something uncomfortably sad to be talking about. The man’s daemon, a sleek magpie, sits on his shoulder, peering at Dr Gilbert with the same, glittering, gleeful eyes.

“You’re not even the tiniest bit curious?” Ischaima asks.

Sam looks at his daemon, perched on the back of a chair across the table from him. She stares back, heart shaped face tilted, inky eyes disappointed.

“It’s none of our business,” he replies coolly.

He can feel just how strongly Ischaima disagrees with that one. She ruffles her feathers and blinks. Sam turns away to look at the television.

The reporter and the psychologist are nodding their heads at each other, looking sombre. Ischaima’s eyes bore into the side of Sam’s face as he pointedly ignores her chastising look.

They’ve been staying in this apartment for almost two months, now.

After Amelia apologetically closed the door behind herself for the last time, Sam had packed up everything and taken to the open road once more.

It had been easy, he told himself. The stretch of the road being eaten up by the Impala’s hungry wheels, the windows down and the music playing and everything he’d ever need.

He’d lasted all of a week before taking a detour into Topeka _just to look around,_ only to pull up outside an apartment block to read a sign that said in bold orange letters _APARTMENTS AVAILABLE_.

 _Don’t be an idiot_ , Ischaima had said.

It wasn’t the first time Sam ignored his daemon’s advice, not by a long shot.

It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than the long, stretching promise of wearing down the Impala’s tyres and eating out of greasy spoons and choosing what fake person to be next until their card maxes out.

He had accumulated enough income staying with Amelia to hand over the first month’s rent to the landlady, a tall redheaded woman with nice shoes, an impatient scowl and an even more impatient monkey dæmon. It was small, the furniture mismatched and at least a decade old, but she hadn’t asked too many questions.

She’d accepted the fistful of cash Sam threw at her with only a slight sneer.

And so, hidden in the outskirts of Topeka, Sam had coasted through a job in a nicely populated bar and an apartment with green walls and small windows, and Ischaima hadn’t breathed a word of her perpetual disapproval.

Until now, that is.

“This is _literally_ our business,” she says with a trill in her voice.

“The _fa_ mily business,” Sam sneers back, pulling at the _a_ with a long, sarcastic drawl.

On the TV screen, the camera cuts to footage from the previous day, outside Victim Nine Vincent Motts’ home. Concerned neighbours look tearfully on in the grey light at the cordoned off lawn splattered with blood, where Motts’ giant otter daemon had clawed her way into his stomach and chest.

“Yes, Sam,” Ischaima mutters darkly.

The dining table separates them, cluttered with books and magazines, a plate and a bowl and a coffee cup. The whole room feels cluttered as the light from the TV flickers shadows about it, airless, though the windows are open, bleeding in the cloudy chill of the morning.

She shuffles on the back of the chair, her talons digging into its wood, gouging deep grooves of her anger.

It’s Thursday morning. They have nothing to do and Sam is painfully aware of it in a way he hasn’t been for a while.

He should’ve accepted Janie’s offer to swap shifts.

The camera cuts again, this time to an interview with Motts’ ex-wife, a curly haired blonde woman. Her crocodile tears glitter on her cheeks, and her mouth moves rapidly around words no doubt full of loving descriptions of how peaceable Vincent Motts was, how unlikely that this should happen.

They’ve been in Topeka for almost two months, and Sam is angry because Ischaima’s right, and even if she wasn’t, this is the most interesting thing to have happened since they arrived, but he can’t bring himself to care.

No, that’s not quite true.

It’s a terrible thing, to think of a daemon losing themselves like that. A terrible imagining that Sam feels a deep sense of pity over. But it isn’t his fight, not this one. His caring is an abject, instinctive kind of care.

He’s fought enough, and in any case, who’s to say it’s supernatural anyway?

“Plenty of things make daemons sick,” Sam points out, hating his own need to justify his apathy.

The sound that escapes Ischaima is about as close to a squawk as she can manage.

“Like what?” she demands.

Sam’s brain scatters for answers, and he drags them up like driftwood.

“Like dementia. Or Rejection Syndrome. Or, or loads of things.”

His heart hits a wall of stubborn rebuttal, and he forces himself to look back at his daemon, at her warm face that he adores.

“Dementia,” she says, like it’s a foreign word. “The third victim was twenty-three.”

“Yeah, not dementia –” he begins.

“And I didn’t realise Rejection Syndrome was contagious, Sam,” Ischaima interrupts before he can suggest it again.

“I didn’t say it was,” he protests, standing up to briskly tidy the table. Ischaima watches him with passive, soft judgement, the way she would watch him scurry around the motel room as a child when Dad was away and Dean was out.

He takes the plate and the bowl and the cup to the kitchen, scrubs them absently with cold water. He can feel her concern, resting like a shadow against his heart.

It’s been there for a while now. It pierced his chest when that bone went through Dick Roman’s throat, and now it’s moulded itself into place the way it never did before.

For over a year, she has watched him, waiting, and Sam knows she won’t wait much longer. With Amelia around, at least, she could pretend to be happy, just like Sam. But she’s never been good at hiding the heart she shares with him, and it’s hurting badly the longer this chill endures.

She hasn’t followed him, which is strange, and he can feel the slight pull of their distance, though it isn’t more than a few metres. They spent so many years clinging to each other, every moment they aren’t touching feels like a crater has hollowed out between them.

He is about to return to the living room, to the sickly green walls and the taupe carpet with the footprint stains near the door, when Ischaima’s voice echoes through the apartment, a shriek of his name, and something swells inside Sam.

He can feel her, like her wings stretched out behind his ribs. He can sense her spike of panic, but it isn’t fear. It’s surprise and it’s wonder and it lifts him like a burst of zero gravity.

Sam rushes to her, fingers ready to reach out, to grab her, but she hasn’t moved.

She’s still sitting on the back of the chair, looking at the television intently, her wings outstretched and flapping.

Sam looks, too, but rather than the weightlessness of her shock, he feels his guts turn to dense, swollen ice inside him.

On the television, the screen has returned to the victims’ street, to a detective of some kind making a statement, probably about safety and security and alertness. The screen is littered with journalists and officers and civilians, but behind the man, on Vincent Motts’ lawn, there sits sentry a lithe dog, her coat mottled with shades of dusty oranges and browns and reds and blacks.

The dog is a daemon, no question about it, though her human is standing too far away for the camera’s reach.

And it is a _her_ , Sam knows that as well as he knows that she’s an African Wild Dog, that her voice is deep and that her eyes, which look black from afar, are actually a very dark shade of bronze.

She sits calmly, her ears rounded outwards and her snout a little stubbed.

Sam sees her for only a few seconds, because the camera cuts back to the reporter, his slick black hair and his neat white teeth and his trim blue suit.

Abruptly, Sam can feel the sweat between his shoulder blades, damp cold like the dew outside.

“Did you see her?” Ischaima asks, but she knows he did.

Sam looks at her. Something’s stinging in his face, and it might be his eyes but it might be his cheekbones swelling under his skin. He’s stinging all over, the sight of that slender, smooth coat leaving him rolling in nettles.

“Odikaia,” he says, and his tongue sticks to the roof of his parched mouth.

His heart is pounding inside his head, inside his throat, stealing all his rational thoughts and all his rational words, replacing them with terror and delight.

Ischaima’s talons grip the chair tighter, the wood crunching in her grasp.

Her round chasm eyes are still sad.

“Guess it’s our business now, is it?” she asks softly, and Sam laughs a loud, ugly laugh.

.

.

Amelia doesn’t leave easily. It’s a tear, and it leaves a bloody wound.

Not quite losing a limb, per say, but more than a finger. A chunk of flesh is bitten out of Sam, and he realises that it’s a sort of first for him.

He’s never really felt that ache, watching the girl walk away like that, actually choose someone else, choose another life. Jess was wrenched from him by Azazel’s cunning hands and everyone before or since, Sam has walked away from, pulled away from, fled.

There’s a brief flash of Madison somewhere in those memories, her tear stained face, the gun too heavy in his shaking hand.

But that was something else entirely, a vicious anomaly that left him breathless, Ischaima reeling in the aftermath of his shapeless grief.

So when Amelia walks away, it’s something new, something painful. But it’s not soul destroying.

The supernatural so often seems to come in waves of extremity. Mothers pinned to ceilings, the apocalypse, the clash of Heaven and Hell, the rise of the Leviathans.

It’s all so big, so epic, so devastating.

But Amelia, meek and hurtful, tonguing him with heat and adoration, only to pull her bra straps back up, slide her feet into her shoes and say, _I’m sorry, Sam, but Donnie was my whole world, and he still is_ , that’s something his brain doesn’t understand fully, not at first.

So it takes a while to staunch the bleeding. For the first week after arriving in Topeka he ghosts, spoiled milk and a dropped glass and shouting at a neighbour through the wall for playing Frank Sinatra too loudly at eight thirty in the evening.

It’s almost enjoyable, the irrational post-breakup blues. A gushing relief to feel something, even if it was only the irritation of Amelia’s betrayal.

It doesn’t last, of course. He gets over her easily enough, all things considered.

The numb creeps back, frostbite over his emotions, and smiling at the customers from behind the bar becomes easy, not because he is happy but because there is nothing to keep the pain close.

.

.

Topeka has its fair share of motels. It takes Sam over an hour to call them all.

By the time he slams down the phone for the last time, Ischaima’s agitation is making him want to claw his own fingernails out.

“Fine!” he barks at her morose stare. “Fine! Let’s go to the hospital and check out the latest vic.”

She soars from her perch on top of the open door; digs her talons into his shoulder, pinching the skin through three layers of clothing.

“Your suit would be better,” Ischaima trills, but Sam just locks the apartment door behind himself.

“Don’t push your luck,” he mutters.

Ischaima nudges her sharp beak against his cheek, but it’s soothed by the downy feathers of her face, the reprimand kissed over with an apology.

When he clambers into the Impala, she hops onto the dashboard, staring eagerly out at the road as Sam speeds into the town centre for the first time in almost a month.

His entire body is thrumming with energy, invigorated by the growl of the Impala’s engine.

The skies overhead are swollen, ready to burst at any moment, a pregnant mass of charcoal clouds.

“They might be gone,” Sam says, and he doesn’t bother trying to hide the tremor in his voice.

Ischaima can already feel it in his thoughts, and in any case – Sam can feel it in hers, too.

“They’re not gone,” she replies calmly.

She speaks with the same steady confidence she always exudes when she is pleased with Sam’s decisions.

He hasn’t felt it in a while, but the blanket of its protection fits him as well as it ever did, her faith in him, an anchor amidst his flighty fears. His foot is stuck to the accelerator, his hands trembling on the steering wheel, but maybe that’s just because he’s gripping it tight enough to rip it from the frame.

The hospital looms like a prison as he pulls into the car park. There’s an odd bleakness to the faces of everyone passing in and out of its doors as he approaches. No vibrancy of healing, no sour torment of death, only a strangeness lingering between the doctors and the nurses and the patients and the visitors, distancing them from each other like viscous smoke.

Or perhaps there’s nothing. Perhaps after fifteen months of numb smog, Sam finally realises just how detached he feels towards those around him. The way Ischaima’s wings rustle uncomfortably, he thinks he knows the real truth, there.

He strides purposefully towards the ICU, and it’s almost alarming how close he manages to get to Vincent Motts’ room before someone finally questions him.

“Are you a relative?” a young doctor with a round, dimpled face and a tightly drawn ponytail asks.

There’s suspicion creasing around her eyes, but the downturn of her lips looks more like sympathy.

“A-A friend,” Sam says, looking down bashfully.

Ischaima hoots soulfully.

Sometimes, having a barn owl dæmon comes in very handy.

The doctor melts a little, and glances over her shoulder apologetically.

“I’m afraid I can’t let you in to see him,” she says, and places a hand on Sam’s arm stiffly, an expression of empathy that has almost certainly been taught, because there’s nothing natural about it. “But a member of his family is still in the hospital, if you’d like to talk to him?”

Sam nods vigorously, barely remembering to maintain his solemn expression when the doctor smiles gently.

“Thank you so much,” he gushes, and the relief isn’t exactly faked.

“Just wait right here,” the doctor says, turning on her heel while Sam settles on the edge of a nearby chair.

The fluorescent lights are straining his eyes, and everything feels washed out. The pale blue floors, the hospital scrubs, the doctors’ coats, the diagrams on the walls. Ischaima rears her head to butt it against Sam’s temple.

 _Calm down_ , she tells him.

 _This is it_ , he returns, trembling.

Absently, Sam reaches up a hand to stroke her wing. She accepts the affection for what it is, instinct and self-reassurance.

He thinks back to the TV screen, to the leery reporter and the smug, sobbing ex-wife. He thinks back to Odikaia, her autumn leafy coat and his anxiety spikes.

The doctor returns swiftly, followed by a tall man.

Sam feels his stomach drop. On his shoulder, Ischaima’s claws dig painfully.

It _is_ actually some sort of family member.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name before,” the doctor prompts.

“It’s Sam,” Sam says, cold and dreading. He ignores the cursing Ischaima throws his way, a tight ring of disapproval in their bond. “I’m a friend of Vincent’s.”

“I’m Vince’s cousin, Jacob,” the man says. His voice is thick; his eyes are dry and pink. His dæmon, a newt of some kind, is clutched around his left hand.

“Have you heard anything about his condition?” Sam asks, gesturing for Jacob to take a seat beside him.

Jacob regards Sam warily, with eyes that clearly _want_ to trust, but don’t quite know whether or not he can.

“Vincent and I used to work together, a while back,” Sam says, ducking his head shyly, like he’s embarrassed. “We kept in touch.”

In a moment of astonishing good fortune, Jacob smiled a wobbly grin and nodded.

“He said a few of the boys from work stuck around.”

He sounds grateful, and Sam latches onto it like a bone.

“He’s a stand up guy,” he said eagerly. “Of course we stuck around.”

Jacob’s smile widened a fraction, before twisting into something regretful and awkward.

“Well, Sam, I appreciate it. I’m sure Vince will, too, when he – he wakes up.”

The last part is choked out the way a child holds back a flooding tantrum, red faced and coughing.

Sam shifts, Jacob’s newt dæmon wriggles around until she’s sitting in her human’s palms.

“Have doctors said when that’ll happen?” Sam prompts gently.

To his credit, Jacob waits until he’s ready before attempting speech again.

“Maybe tomorrow, maybe next year,” he spits, and there’s anger there but whether it’s directed at the doctors, at Vincent or at the situation in general is unclear. “They’ve got a bunch of experts looking into it. I just don’t understand. Juno was never – she was the sweetest darn dæmon I ever saw.”

“Yeah,” Sam says cautiously, “Yeah, she was.”

Sam glances at his own dæmon, tries to imagine Ischaima clawing at his face and shrieking hate like thunder. She stares back, compassionate and brave, and he knows she’s trying to imagine it, too.

He knows she’s failing to imagine it, too.

“Was she acting strange at all before yesterday?” Sam asks.

“Nah,” Jacob sighs, rubbing his face with his free hand and his dæmon’s back with the thumb of the other. “Racked my brain trying to remember for the police, but I got nothing.”

“The police?” Sam says, perhaps a little too eagerly, but after a brief narrowing of his eyes Jacob seems to take Sam’s sudden loudness for alarm, and nods slowly.

“Yeah, they’ve been by a couple times now. A whole score of ‘em.”

He sounds bitter, the words wrangled for the first time from yearning to needling.

Sam scrutinises Jacob.

He looks older than the photo of Vincent Motts on the TV, his dark hair streaked liberally with sandy grey. There’s stubble on his face, exhaustion-induced-apathy, and his clothes, while clean, look like they were pulled out of the back of the cupboard in haste.

His face is pinched with despair, greying his skin and creasing his lips.

Sam’s just about ready to press for more details, when the man turns bodily towards him, looking determined.

“I tell you something though, Sam,” Jacob says candidly, voice gritted with determination. “She said something awful strange before she went silent, today.”

Sam’s interest piques.

“Oh?” he asks lightly.

“Yeah,” Jacob nods. “She kept asking _Where are you?_ Vince was barely two feet away. _Where are you?_ She kept asking. The damnedest thing. Like she was blind as anything.”

He looks away, tired out by the confusion and the sadness.

They sit together, as the hospital bustles around them, mentally clutching their dæmons a little tighter.

After a while, after the shared fear grows stale, turning into an uncomfortable silence, Sam clears his throat.

Jacob looks up at him as he stands.

Sam flails for a moment, and Ischaima is a little too smug about it, but he recovers.

“Your phone?” he asks, and Jacob hands it over, eyes glazed with distrust again.

Sam taps his cell number in quickly, adding in the name _Sam Bolton_.

“Call me if you – just, if you need anything. Or, news. If there’s –”

Thankfully, Jacob mistakes Sam’s fumbling _forgotten-how-to-be-kind_ muttering for flustered _eager-to-help_ muttering. He puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder, has to reach up a little, but he does it, and somehow manages to make Sam feel a lot shorter as he is stared down by those soft, red rimmed eyes.

“I will, son. Thank you.”

He has a look of gratitude that Sam hasn’t seen in a long time. The _you-just-saved-me-from-something-awful_ look where usually the _something_ is a ghost or a Hell-demon or a wendigo, but here it’s just simple, human hopelessness. It drives a hard stake through Sam’s gut to see it, to remember how easy it can be to earn that look.

Jacob looks at Sam like he’s the first person to come check up on his cousin, and Sam thinks that maybe Vincent Motts lied about his work buddies _sticking around_ , whatever the hell that meant.

Sam drifts back down the hospital corridor, away from Vincent Motts, away from his cousin. Ischaima is heavy on his shoulder, and for the first time in a long time Sam thinks of his father.

He remembers John Winchester’s stooping stride, bowed against the weight of the supernatural world tugging him down. He remembers Tolmiros, his osprey dæmon, clutching his shoulder the way Ischaima clutches Sam, now.

 _You’re more like him than I will ever be_ , Dean had said, years ago, before everything that really mattered.

Sam feels the truth of it, now. But he also feels also just how wrong Dean was.

Sam knows exactly what his father would think of him, holed up in a crappy apartment in Topeka working the late shifts behind a bar, earning tips because he’s got a pretty face and a prettier dæmon and he knows how to be friendly the way his big brother knew how to be charming – lazily, reluctantly, stubbornly, out of practice but never quite forgetting.

As he exits the hospital, the hurt returns like a burst pipe, and Sam is gripped momentarily by just how desperately lonely he feels. Ischaima’s downy pale wings are soft against his face as he stumbles to the Impala, wrenches open the door and throws himself inside. She sits in his lap, feet clutched awkwardly into his thighs, and Sam buries his fingers into those downy pale feathers, presses his face against her gentle head and hitches his breath, gulping air like he’s drowning.

And he _is_ , he realises. Ischaima’s watched it happen all along.

He’s drowning like this, less water and more quicksand, the ground swallowing him up inch by inch so slowly he’d thought he was safe but he’s never been safe, not really, not since he was six months old.

He’s entirely alone in this utterly godforsaken world, without John Winchester and without Bobby Singer and without Jessica Moore. Without Dean.

He doesn’t even have Amelia’s butter warm platitudes to soften how alone he feels.

His bond to Ischaima sits in the hollow of his chest, swollen to make up for the lack of anything else in the coldness around him but it’s not enough. It used to be when they were kids, at least he thought it did, but that’s because he always thought he was alone when he was twelve.

He was never actually alone when he was twelve.

“Where the fuck is he?” Sam gasps between aching breaths.

For the first time since seeing Dean’s dæmon on that goddamn television screen, the weight of Sam’s brother’s presence, however abstract it is right now, drops stones inside his lungs.

Neither of them quite say it, because neither of them dare, but it’s widening the chasm between them all the same.

What if it _wasn’t_ Odikaia on that screen?

“I don’t know,” Ischaima whispers into the crevice of his throat where he’s hunched around her protectively, the single most vulnerable piece of himself, laid bare and beautiful for him to treasure.

Her shivering calms him, soothes the ache and Sam settles around her. For months he’s been denying the pain she’s nudged his way, and now he launches it at her like a weapon?

It’s cruel, and it’s everything she doesn’t deserve.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, the words lost in her feathers.

She nips him with her beak, affectionate and reproachful.

“It’s time to stop running, Sam,” she says, her voice fresh like a brook in the desert, light like spring wind. “It will be ok.”

It’s a very kind lie, so kind that Sam laughs, but he’s cut short, his blood thinning to water in his veins.

“Let’s go,” she says, as well.

Sam obeys.

.

.

Coming back from the dead takes a lot of work.

Clawing his way out of his own grave had been a sweet slice of cherry pie compared to the sparkling sheer heat of his return from Purgatory.

Those white sky blinding skin blisters, Dean feels the cracking of his ribs as he’s thrust through the chasm that separates God’s Armpit from Earth. He feels Benny screaming for breath and blood, hears Castiel in his ears like a shrill, trembling earthquake.

He bellows into the endless void; comes to silent and retching in Maine. The fog is thick and the air tastes of pine cones and it’s Earth, it’s goddamn Earth. It’s heavy with humanity and it’s hard to breathe with all this air.

Dean drops to his knees, still clutching his makeshift machete, the soggy soil creeping through his jeans, the trees pressing close about him. The dark above covers the stars, but they’re there. He can feel them glittering.

He can feel Odikaia, too.

Ears tuned by the creeping quiet of monster afterlife, he hears the damp padding of her paws as she approaches. Dean bows his head, spine hardening to lead inside him. Her snout brushes over his forehead, and she butts against him.

He can smell her, wood smoke and clean rain.

Odikaia whines, pain and adoration, his dæmon, the carrier of his heart.

“Cold,” he whispers.

One hand, the hand not weighed down with the chains of Benny latched into his forearm, buries into her scruff.

She snorts, licks a smear of bloody dirt from his cheek. Odikaia is warm and she’s here, right here, her breath rumbling inside her throat.

“I’m sorry,” he says, cracked and shivering all over.

“I’m here,” she replies for the first time in a year.

.

.

It takes almost half an hour, but eventually Dean pulls himself to his feet.

If anything, the darkness has grown more solid around them. Odikaia looks up at him, eyes ink black and soft.

“Don’t,” Dean snaps, when he feels the soft tread of her comfort around him like a balm.

She pulls it back into herself, leaving him cold again, and he smiles a tight smile of gratitude.

She doesn’t ask about Cas.

She doesn’t’ need to ask about Cas, and before that thought can truly manifest Dean shuts it down. His forearm is burning, he has no idea where he is but he’s pretty sure if he’s not in Louisiana yet.

Benny didn’t seem to have any reassurance about the side effects of carrying the spirit of a vampire inside your bloodstream for long periods of time, but Dean can’t imagine it’s anything good.

Odikaia doesn’t ask about him, either. Dean brushes his fingers over her head in gratitude as he gathers his thoughts and looks about him.

“Smell anything?” he asks.

Odikaia trots a short distance away, pawing tentatively at the ground.

Dean watches her pick through the pines, a shadow he’s ached to see for a year.

“Anything?” he says, voice swallowed by the fog lingering among the tree tops.

“Campers, less than half a kilometre,” she replies.

Dean grimaces, trudging through the ferns towards her.

It doesn’t take long to fall into a rhythm they’ve been running since they were four years old. Odikaia bounds ahead; Dean follows her at a tight, quick pace.

His feet sink into the mud a little with each step as he runs and his heart is pounding with something other than visceral terror. Something wondrous instead.

He follows his dæmon into an occupied clearing: tent and pit and rucksacks.

Two shivering teenagers with fluttering dæmons.

One, a bright hummingbird, makes a shrill ticking cry as Dean picks up the closest rucksack behind Odikaia’s snarl.

His arm burns and he can see her soft limp as she runs before him.

The slip of Castiel’s hand falling out of his own is a phantom grabbing at them, his wretched voice chomping at their heels, but they run on.

When they stop, Odikaia keeps her silence faithfully, like she always does.

.

.

Sam drives through Topeka in a daze.

Ischaima’s talons have punctured the leatherback of the seat. He drives out to the suburbs, to the peony striped lawns of Victor Motts’ neighbours, to the bloodied lawn of Victor Motts himself.

The Impala rolls to a halt three doors down. Sam stares at the empty house and tries not to think about breaking inside.

He tries not to think about the lock pick in the dashboard, or about the EMF reader in the trunk. He tells himself how phenomenally stupid it would be to even think about breaking into a nicely painted house on a nicely painted street owned by nicely painted suburban people.

He starts up the ignition with a hard hand and drives too fast down the street. The Impala squeals around the T-junction and the empty house calls after him like a haunting.

“We could check out the other victims’ houses?” Ischaima prompts when they hit their third red light in the town centre.

Sam drums his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel in response.

Outside, Topeka trickles along its streets.

He watches as a young man struggles to pull a recalcitrant little boy down the sidewalk while carrying a large suitcase.

Three girls wearing matching t-shirts and too much makeup are hovering outside a restaurant.

An old woman stands staring into a shop window.

Sam looks at the shop window, too.

It’s an antique store, a line of battered books arranged at the floor of the display, an assortment of burnished gold items hanging above them.

Sam peers a little closer.

“Sam!” Ischaima tuts, but Sam ignores her.

There’s an advertisement asking for volunteers inside, beneath it a poster for an outdoor cinema screening of Casablanca.

Next to them, a blown up picture of a girl’s face, the word MISSING emblazoned above it in block red letters.

Sam glances down the street again.

On a lamp post near the three chattering girls is the same face, this time on an even larger sheet of paper.

She’s smiling, but only just. Perhaps fourteen years old, with masses of mousy blonde curls surrounding her face, falling in a flyaway fringe over her forehead.

“Sam, drive,” Ischaima snaps, and abruptly Sam hears the loud horn blaring from the Audi behind him.

“Sorry,” he calls with a meek wave into the rear view mirror as the driver behind him, a man in his fifties at least, gesticulates wildly. He shifts gear and drives on quickly, navigating the crossroad with sharp turns and pulling suddenly into the next available car park two blocks down.

“What are we doing?” Ischaima demands, hopping onto the forearm Sam offers her before he climbs out of the car.

“Just checking something,” he says, and receives a dark glare for it.

The car park is half empty. There’s a long stretch of wall on the east side that’s covered with posters. Even from a distance, Sam can see the girl’s face printed here, too.

He strides over, deaf to Ischaima’s fluttering, and pulls the nearest poster off. It rips at the tape a little, damp from the weather.

 _Elaine Ascott_ , the poster names her.

She’s apparently sixteen years old and has been missing for almost two weeks now.

“There’s nothing here about calling the police,” Sam says, pointing to the details at the bottom of the page.

“Victoria Sheldon,” Ischaima reads aloud. “Friend?”

“Must be,” Sam agrees. “Worth a look.”

He glances at his watch.

Time has already sailed past midday, the middle of the lunchtime lull.

Sam folds the poster and pockets it.

“We should be focusing on the victims,” Ischaima reminds him as he returns to the Impala. “And the weird dæmon message.”

“Asking _where are you_ isn’t a message, Ischi,” Sam rebuts, distracted. “The dæmon was confused. It could easily be nothing.”

“So could a missing schoolgirl in a city of over a hundred thousand people!” The barn owl bats at him softly with one wing. “We know that Odi–”

“We don’t _know_ anything,” Sam interrupts, cheeks hot and gut trembling. “Look, we can check out the house when it isn’t broad daylight. Right now, we either chase our tails all day or we call this Victoria Sheldon and ask about Elaine Ascott. Ok?”

Disgruntled, Ischaima swoops into the Impala and carries her stiff silence all the way to the Sheldon house.

It’s a big house. There’s space for at least three cars in the driveway with breathing room, and the front door is impressively wide.

Sam knocks three times.

Ischaima, upset as she is by the detour, has taken her place on his right shoulder, and when the door opens it’s her that the girl who answers looks at first, before turning to look at Sam.

“Miss Sheldon?” he tries, gently.

The girl looks older than the photo of Elaine Ascott, eighteen at most. She cocks her hip and folds her arms in what looks like a practiced move. She’s very tall, skinny and pale with her black hair in a pixie cut, wearing an ill fitting summer dress.

“Who are you?” she asks in a tone that sounds as rehearsed as her posture.

“I’m Agent Wallace. I’m with the FBI.”

She eyes his badge shrewdly then his hastily thrown on suit that he’d never gotten around to removing from the trunk of the car. He hadn’t acknowledged Ischaima’s trilling triumph as he’d pulled it on hastily in a bathroom. The shirt is creased, but it’s one of his nicer ties and he’s aware he probably looks harassed enough to be an FBI agent right now.

This part had always been easier with Dean by his side, whose dæmon looked far more law enforcement than a graceful bird of prey.

After a moment, however, the girl nods.

At her shins, a richly furred fox dæmon folds its front legs together and lies down calmly.

“I’m Victoria Sheldon,” she says, sounding a little defensive. “Why are you here?”

In answer, Sam pulls the poster of Elaine Ascott from his jacket.

“You’re finally getting the police to do something?” She perks up almost instantly.

“Actually,” Sam says. “I’m hoping to look into it myself.”

“What does the FBI want with Elaine?”

She’s suspicious again, pulling up her shoulders and flicking her dress around her knees. At her feet, her dæmon blinks up at Sam.

“Other than to find her safe and sound?” Sam retorts. “Nothing. With all the,” he pauses, considering, “ _unusual_ things going on at the moment, we just want to make sure everyone is safe.”

Victoria looks mostly unconvinced, but she doesn’t seem ready to shut down the conversation just yet.

“Don’t you guys, like, come in pairs and stuff?”

Sam’s not prepared for that particular stab, and it winds him momentarily. He pulls a smile over his frown before it can fully carve into his face.

“Yeah,” he replies like she’s just answered a test question, but it comes a moment to late to be entirely convincing. “My partner is making other enquiries, so it’s just me right now.”

Victoria Sheldon, with her pretty blue eyes and pursed lips, regards him distrustfully.

She wears a look of determination that Sam is almost certain will be to his advantage.

Whether she believes he’s FBI or not, lack of any other resources to find her friend will probably win him her favour, if not her total trust.

The hallway she’s standing in is a pleasant, dull shade of crème. Further down, along the wall, he can see a large painting of a stormy sea.

He wonders, briefly, if he’s imagining the loneliness he can read in her face.

“I want to help you find your friend, Victoria,” he says, earnest and hopeful.

There’s some residual guilt over the possibility that Elaine Ascott could be nothing more than a dead end for Sam to back up from, but it’s fleeting and easily ignored.

Victoria’s nod is stilted.

“Come in,” she says, stepping to one side and opening the door further.

Her dæmon doesn’t budge.

Sam steps over it awkwardly, thanking the girl as she directs him to the living room, which is as coldly decorated at the hallway, all lilac and grey, like a hotel room.

Victoria follows, her dæmon trotting at her heels.

“Thank you,” she announces from the doorway as Sam takes a seat on the sofa.

She fiddles with a ring on her thumb, and her dæmon nudges the backs of her knees in encouragement. Her cheeks are pink and her mouth wobbles around more words that never come to fruition.

She looks like she’s fighting hard to contain a smile.

Sam just nods, pushing his own smile back into his face a little deeper as the stones lodged in his chest rattle desperately and his dæmon shifts anxiously.

“You’re welcome,” he replies.

He can taste vomit in the words, like regret and resentment.

The girl takes a seat on the loveseat, opposite him.

“What do you want to know?” she asks.

Sam can see the story poised on her tongue, just waiting to burst free.

.

.

It’s barely twilight when Sam returns to Vincent Motts’ house.

The street is silent, every house shut tight against the descending darkness as Sam strolls leisurely up the sidewalk.

The front of the house is washed sickly orange by the street lamp outside, but it’s detached, and access is free and shadowed on both sides.

Casting a cursory glance up and down the vacant road, Sam slips up the driveway and around the house on light feet.

The backyard is shielded by a tall fence on one side and an even taller hedge on the other. The lawn here is patchier than the front yard, with freshly tilled soil in one corner and yellowing grass at the base of the hedges.

There’s a metal table and three chairs near the backdoor. An overflowing ashtray and a glass that still has what looks like orange juice in it.

All the curtains are open, but it’s dark inside. Sam peers into what turns out to be the kitchen. A pile of clean dishes on the drying rack, a couple of dirty ones in the sink.

On the ledge in front of him, a row of wilting herbs.

Cautiously, Sam fiddles with the lock on the back door until it snaps loudly in the indigo dusk.

At the end of the garden, a thrush watches him curiously.

He sneaks in, holding the door open for Ischaima, who’s been hovering as sentry above his head. She swoops in, claws clacking on the kitchen table as she perches, looking around the room for signs of disturbance.

“Anything?” she asks. Sam pulls the EMF reader out of his pocket, but it looks dead.

“There’s something wrong,” Sam says, though he’s not sure why. Ischaima doesn’t look surprised.

She cocks her head, like maybe she’s only considering explaining to him.

Sam’s gaze is pulled briefly to the ceiling.

“Let’s go,” he says, offering an arm for her to hop onto.

He treads carefully through the house, lights off, stopping at the three photos in the living room – a group of men including weepy cousin Jacob in one of them, a school photo of a little girl with blonde pigtails and a missing front tooth, and another face down that turns out to be a snapshot of an elderly couple dancing.

The house wears its decorations oddly, ill fitting and distant. The sofa is decent and there’s a nice game station set up beneath a wide flat screen TV, the coffee table looks almost expensive.

Sam walks through impassive, Ischaima’s head turning from side to side, taking in everything.

The stairs are silent as he ascends them. No photos on the wall here, but a poster at the top of them that looks like a print of a Picasso that doesn’t suit the rest of the décor.

On the landing, three doors shut.

A fourth one is open.

It’s only cracked, and there’s no light coming through, but Sam feels trepidation in his heart. Ischaima’s talons clasp his forearm tight.

He approaches slowly, edges towards the door but the EMF is silent and so is the house and there isn’t a sound, not even from outside.

Sam nudges the door open, one hand on the hilt of the knife tucked into his jacket.

The door is loud as it opens, brushing against thick, dark carpet.

He takes one step, and in the fraction of a moment before he enters the room he knows the same way he knows night from day exactly what he’s going to find.

His fingers scrabble for the light switch, and for a second it’s blinding, then it’s only yellow.

The room is a bedroom, the guest one by the looks of it.

The bed is neatly made, dark blue covers and a lamp on a pine cabinet next to it.

There’s someone inside.

Sam looks at the dæmon first.

She’s sitting upright, ears pricked upwards, staring at him, a statue of radiant orange and brown and white. On the shoulder joint of one front leg, there’s a rich black mark in the shape of a hand.

Sam turns his head, looks at the man sitting on the bed, elbows resting on his knees and a gun rolling between his hands. His hair’s a little long, and he’s more tanned than Sam has maybe ever seen him. Not since they were kids, at least.

His eyes are vicious and his smile is tight. His clothes are crumpled. His shoulders are hunched.

“Hey there, Sammy,” Dean says with quiet, deadly suspicion.

.

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (1) Barn Owl, stealth hunters, sometimes called the “Demon Owl” or “Death Owl”, they are culturally associated with ghosts, and more generally with wisdom and independence.   
> (2) Ischaima, adapted from the Greek “ischyri aimatos” meaning “strong blood”.   
> (3) African Wild Dog, the “ultimate hunter” (according to the Saan of Botswana) with the strongest social bonds in the Savannah; they prioritise their pups above the rest of the pack. Culturally connected to origins of Death.   
> (4) Odikaia, adapted from the Greek “o dikaios” meaning “the righteous”.  
> (5) Osprey, a solo bird of prey also known as a Fish Eagle or Sea Hawk. They mate for life, and their young often return to their birthplace despite fledging early. They represent power, integrity and creativity.   
> (6) Tolmiros, the Greek word for “bold”.


End file.
